BiffVernon Blogspot

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Of windfarms, birds and global warming.

At a meeting of the Louth branch of Lincolnshire Wildlife
Trust, we were treated to a talk by John Clarkson, local birder. John spends much of his life sitting near or
walking around windfarms. For offshore
sites a boat is required. His job is to
watch the birds, identify them, count them, track their movements and general
behaviour as they interact with the windfarms.
Windfarm developers have to commission such studies as part of the
planning process.

We learned that birds sometimes die as a result of
collisions with wind turbines. There was
the celebrated case of the white-throated needle-tailed swift, only three
records of which exist for the British Isles. The last specimen to stray the thousands of
miles from its normal home in eastern Asia died, to the
consternation of the throng of birders that had gathered to watch this rarity,
when it flew into a turbine.

However, it soon became clear from the data that John
presented that wind turbine mortalities pale into insignificance beside the
bigger dangers of buildings with windows, cats, motor vehicles and pesticides.
The clear message is if you want to reduce bird mortality don’t have a
cat. Harder to quantify, we heard, but
by far the most significant impact on bird populations is habitat loss. More of that anon.

John’s detailed observation reports and the records of radar
tracking over the North Sea were fascinating. Birds, it seems, are well able to see wind
turbines and take avoiding action – flying round them. An exception, in Spain,
is the gryphon-vulture, which flies with its head down looking at the ground
and not watching where it is going!
Spanish windfarm operators have, however, greatly reduced mortality by
keeping a lookout for approaching vultures and stopping the turbines for a few
minutes, with negligible loss of electricity generation, while the vultures
sail safely by. British and Danish bird
observations show that almost all daytime bird flights are low down, below the
height of turbine blades. This is
especially true at sea where almost all birds fly within a very few metres of
the waves. Close observation of a group
of marsh harrier nests within a proposed windfarm site concluded that the birds
hunt close to the ground. Radar tracking
of night time migration flights shows that birds fly very much higher, way
above the turbines.

A survey of a Lincolnshire
windfarm and adjoining farmland showed a greater population of small birds
marking their territories with song within the boundaries of the windfarm. The varied habitat of access tracks and rough
ground provided an improved habitat compared with the neighbouring arable
monoculture. The biodiversity associated
with windfarms should be considered a bonus.
For off-shore windfarms this effect may be even more significant since
turbines prevent the large-scale trawling operations that have destroyed so
much of the North Sea’s bed habitat and the turbine
bases provide structures for reef formation and an explosion of biodiversity.

In the question and answer session that concluded John
Clarkson’s talk, it soon became evident that several of the wildlife-loving
audience were against windfarms. Some
folk just do not like the look of turbines in the landscape, and it’s hard to
argue against personal aesthetics. They
rarely say so explicitly, preferring to come up with other excuses that attempt
to be factual rather than subjective.
Most such arguments fail miserably.
One lady talked of the vast amount of concrete (there’s really only a
little concrete used per unit of electricity generated) and that in 25 years
when the turbine would be removed the concrete would be left in the
ground. I’ve no idea where the idea that
after 25 years the turbine will be removed came from, as if in the year 2039 we will no
longer want electricity. It seems more
likely that as and when turbine components wear out they will be mended or
replaced, with its concrete base having a pretty lengthy serviceable lifetime.

Now recall that John had suggested that far and away the biggest
threat to our bird population was habitat loss.
It was upon this theme that I drew attention to the long term habitat
loss that is inevitable in a business as usual, fossil-fuel burning future, in
which global warming will push average temperatures 4 or more degrees higher
within the lifetimes of our younger children and grandchildren. We had a choice, I pointed out, of either
producing our electricity from renewable sources or doing without power. The alternative, our present course of carbon
emissions, inevitably leads to habitat loss on such a world-wide scale that
discussion of whether birds crash into turbines is utterly irrelevant.

There were, sadly, immediate mutterings of disbelief and
opposition from some in this audience of nature lovers. Denial of science is evidently rife within
what one might assume was a fairly intelligent and informed group of people. Such is the depth of feeling, the subjective
loathing of windfarms, that rational discourse is set aside. Somehow we have to convince these doubters,
not only that the science is right, but that the future is bleak beyond
imagination; that a 4 degree world is just not going to be survivable for vast
swathes of the global population, either of humans or of birds.

Of course many people realise the truth and I am personally
grateful to the lady behind me who thanked me for being brave enough to voice
what she had been thinking. And that
brings me to the conclusion that it’s time to stop being polite about global
warming, ducking the contentious issues, avoiding confrontation with deniers,
whether they be fools or knaves. We need
to shout out that policy and behaviour change must come, quickly, urgently; we
need radical emissions reduction policies, now.
We, the people, need to empower the politicians and legislators to
change direction. When someone mutters
nonsense about doubting the climate science we must look upon them in the same
way as we would one who claims the Moon is made of cheese. After all, anyone can see that the Moon is
the colour of a Wensleydale so of course it must be dairy produce.

Thursday, January 09, 2014

Global warming or climate change?

These two phrases are used, misused and confused.Time for some clarity.

They mean different things. If you use them interchangeably to mean the
same thing then you’re likely to have got it wrong at least half the time. In fact I reckon folk get it wrong more often
than not. There’s a distinct bias
towards climate change, which is somehow regarded as more politically correct,
at least by those who haven’t really thought about it.

First, global warming.
There are clues in the words. Global,
because it affect the globe, the whole planet; warming because the temperature
is rising. Global warming is happening
because we’ve added greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. It will continue happening until the planet
reaches a new equilibrium temperature at which incoming and outgoing radiation
are in balance.

Climate change is to do with changes in climate. Again there are clues in the words. Global warming will cause changes in climate and
these changes are local and regional, varying depending on the geography of
land and mountains, oceans and their currents.

So, if you are discussing whether a particular part of the
world will get warmer or cooler, wetter or drier, more unsettled of more
stable, or you are discussing resulting changes in agriculture, floods and
droughts, population adaptations and migrations, then fine, use the phrase
climate change. These are all the second
order consequences of global warming.

If you are discussing the effects of burning fossil fuel and
of the release of methane on the planet’s climate system, then it is only right
and proper to use the phrase global warming.
Don’t be embarrassed; don’t worry about upsetting people with
inconvenient truths. Call a spade a
spade and call freshly dug soil freshly dug soil, but don’t muddle them up.And another thing... think about sea level rise. Much of it is the result of the thermal expansion of the ocean's water. Now that has to be a result of global warming, pure and simple. No climate changes involved. Even the contribution made by ice melt is a temperature thing. To talk about sea level rise under the heading of 'climate change' stretches language to absurdity. It's global warming.